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About Us

Eating Milwaukee is a food blog devoted to the best of Milwaukee's restaurants, specializing in off-the-beaten-path and ethnic foods. We're a group of food enthusiasts who love sampling new and interesting cuisines, and finding those hidden gems that our city is filled with. We eat without prejudice, and pledge to report honestly and with integrity.

About Our Methods

At Eating Milwaukee, we try our best to adhere to the ad-hoc Food Blog Code of Ethics, which is itself a version of the very official and very serious (no laughing!) Association of Food Journalists Food Critics' Guidlines. We're very proud of our strong reputation as a fair and honest restaurant-based food blog.

We review restaurants based on a few basic ground rules:

1) No chains.

We will not review chains. We eat at chains, we even like some chains, but we won't review them. Multiple locations of the same small business don't count.

2) Smaller is better.

We like dives. We like clean dives even more.

3) Culture rules.

There is no cuisine that is off-limits with us. We're foodies, we like it all. With a few small exceptions, we'll try almost anything twice.

4) Don't take our word for it.

Get out there and support local Milwaukee businesses!

5) We may inform the folks at the restaurant about the blog -- but, if we can, after we eat. We don't like the idea of anyone knowing about the review before we get our food... in case of, you know... tampering. Although it's pretty hard to keep a low profile when you have a huge camera on the table, and your flash keeps going off taking pictures of the chicken soup...

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Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Maybe some day I'll stop being surprised when we're invited to special events, because, ahem, we have a semi-credible website. Maybe someday I'll become jaded with local and undeserved fame, blinded by half-lit rustbelt stars in my eyes, complacent in my cockneyed celebrity. But, that day, thankfully, has not come, and I still blush a little when those e-mails arrive in my inbox, beckoning me to some of Milwaukee's finest eateries.

The staff of Eating Milwaukee was recently invited to a special dinner at Mo's, a Place For Steaks, celebrating Certified Master Chef Ken Arnone. Because it says so in my contract with the Association for Certified Chef's Certification Certificates Corporation, here's a few facts about Certified Global Master Chef Ken Arnone:

Chef Arnone became a Certified Master Chef in 2003, one of only 65 in the country.

Chef Arnone served as CHef Professor at the Culinary Institute of America from 1999-2005

Became a Global Master Chef in 2008

Worked for the CIA at Ristorante Caterina de Medici.

Thinks Milwaukee is by far the most fun city on the Western shore of Lake Michigan.

Our invitation allowed us a plus-one, and I thought, since my mom has consistently thought this blog to be a slightly silly venture whose sole purpose is to spend money on domain registration and restaurant cheques, I would bring her to help show her the fabulous, glamorous side of being a restaurant blogger.

Look! There's the joyful staff of Eating Milwaukee, and my mom, faking a smile for what I promised would be the first and last picture I'd take of her that night.

Because Mo's invited us to this shindig, I'll gladly share with you all of the tasty details, and the tasty pics, but I'm going to abstain on our usual "report card" section, as I believe that's the slightly stand-up thing to do in this situations.

Mo's is a steakhouse with class and panache, this isn't the Texas Roadhouse, and it most certainly isn't the Ponderosa.

We started the evening with butlered hors d'oeuvres.

Lobster Ceviche:

Veggie Sushi:

And an Amuse Bouche of the regular menu item, "The Big Shorty," which is bleu crusted braised short ribs with asparagus and horseradish risotto. Mmmm... little spoons of heaven...

Lobster Ceviche! How elegant! How Chic! But the citrus kind of trampled the delicateness of the lobster to death. Still tasty, just... I'm poor, and if I'm going to eat lobster, I want to make sure I can taste every sweet, succulent morsel. Because sweet and succulent lobster costs extra (Eating Milwaukee Staff In-Joke Alert!).

I'm an all-out lunatic when it comes to sushi, so the veggie maki we were treated to were just fine. Nothing too daring, but still well-executed.

The snack-size Big Shorty was fantastic, and was a great way to whet our palettes for the rest of the meal. Imagine, if this little china spoon of food was so incredible, what were the other six (six!) courses going to be like?

Carbs ahoy!

Well, hold on to your hats, because here comes course number one!

Oh, good golly. It's Nueske's bacon, about two inches thick, and MEATY, braised for something like eight hours, served with a microgreen salad, sweet potato purée, and seared shrimp. Pork Candy is one of those things that should be an automatic invention for a Wisconsin business, and I hope to see it released in time for grilling season next year. Pork Candy. Between Bacchus' pork belly, and Chef Arnone's braised bacon, I'm sold. The bacon literally melted in your mouth, was both meaty and fabulously fatty at the same time, and just wallowed in the sauce made from the braising liquid. Were you the kid that loved the chunk of bacon at the top of the can of Bush's Best Baked Beans? Well, then this will make you pop a few fuses. Why the shrimp? Well, I guess because the bacon needed to stand next to something, to make you realize exactly how kick-butt it really was.

"Hey, Shrimp."

"Yeah, Bacon?"

"Uh, who has no thumbs, sits around in a low braise for eight hours, and blows you out of the water?"

Heeeeyyy... that's not meat! Well, I guess it is, kinda. No, silly me. It's a tasty delicious blackened salmon filet. Served with tomato basil risotto and a spicy Creole sauce. The third course was not accompanied by a wine selection, but rather a mixed drink, a Ketel One Serrano:

This was absolutely delightful, with the texture of the fish at the perfect and almost nearly unattainable point of delicate flakiness with ideal moisture and tenderness. Wonderful, and if I were a man who came to a place like Mo's looking for awesome salmon, I would be impressed. But as I'm a man who would go to Mo's looking for a steak, I yearned for a bovine banquet to bedeck my bowl. I was getting a little nervous...

Victory is mine!

Here's a thing of beauty: a gorgeous, select cut of Snake River Kobe beef tenderloin, cooked just long enough so the Moo isn't so loud as to drown out the dinner conversation, with simple adornments of wilted spinach, caramelized pearl onions, and almond potato croquettes. Yes folks, from the people who brought you the roasted-corn Kit Kat comes the most delicious beef on the planet. I love the Japanese.

It should be noted, if you're a stickler for details (and you are, otherwise you'd be reading someone else's blog right now), that Snake River Kobe should, for all legal purposes, be called Snake River Wagyu/ Angus Proprietary Domestic Cross. But I don't think that has as much marketing sheen to it as just calling it Kobe. Either way, actual Kobe beef is prohibitively expensive, and would probably be a bigger let down than the time we tried Dippin' Dots.

Chef Arnone handles the beef masterfully, and attains such a deep, beefy flavor, it makes even the richest of store-bought steaks seem like pin-the-tail-on-the-cattle. THIS is why you come to Mo's. To have the finest, most exceptionally prepared piece of beast you will ever have the pleasure of cutting with a butter knife.

Okay, so, everyone with me so far? I probably shouldn't have said the word MEAT so many times and with such vigor, because now it just seems like that's all that's on the table, and I sort of feel like my head is spinning and my plaque is going to start flowing... but on with the meat, shall we?

I'm really, really sorry. This was the "surprise treat" fifth course presented to us by Johnny V and Chef Arnone themselves, and I can't remember for the life of me what cut it was. I don't even think it matters at this point. Did you ever, when you were a kid, ride your bike down a drastic hill, paved perfectly smooth with no bumps or cracks? Remember that feeling as your own inertia took you down the hill, rolling faster and faster, until it felt as though the bike tires were lifting off the road, and you were becoming gracefully and effortlessly airborne? Well, this steak was better than that.

Not to be outdone, a member of the waterfowl family decided to make an appearance, thus marking my first ever encounter with Foie Gras.

Seared and buttery, with the most rich flavor, I can't say the entire experience was unpleasant. I do, however, eat with a conscience, and I can only hope that the fowl whose liver I was consuming wasn't force-fed through gavage in an inhumane manner. Any folks out there who want to are free to Google foie gras and research the process themselves -- I'm not going to start a flame war by linking to anything.

I was ready to pass out, Andy was draped across the piano singing showtunes and doing his best Isabella Rossellini impression, Lauren was rambling about the Squeesophone again, and my mom was chatting with the energetic little waiter who kept inexplicably refilling her wine glass, when Chef Arnone wheeled out the portable butane ranges...

Along with that came about ten pounds of butter

Another six pounds of brown sugar

And all of the strawberries in the Western Hemisphere. Yes folks, it was time for the sixth and final course, Strawberries Foster, with Mo's Signature chocolate cake.

Of course half the fun of a Foster dessert is the flambé, and this was no exception:

The finished dish: a wedge of decadent rich chocolate cake a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream, and hot strawberries, brown sugar, butter, and rum all over the top. Holy mackerel.

Here's a run down of exactly everything we had, for those of you with limited short-term memory faculties:

Dining with the fine folks at Mo's, Chef Arnone, and Johnny V was an absolute dream. No matter what kind of wacky food adventures we find ourselves in, it is a rare treat to sit down to a meal so impeccably executed, so complete in every detail, and so doggone delicious. Despite my rambling and playful prose here, we were truly honored to be included on the guest list, and how fortune everyone is that we play host to such an establishment in our own backyard!

We would also like to share our deepest gratitude with Andrew Stockel, Operating Partner at Mo's, who invited us to this edible extravaganza.

We have an old saying in our family when someone treats us to a meal the likes of which Chef Arnone was responsible for,